In a new report, Deloitte's Bryan Funkhouser and Peter Vanderslice describe the current time as the post-digital era. The authors define post-digital as the time in which the five leading forces of technology innovation—analytics, mobile, social, cloud and cyber—“are mature, implemented, integrated and baked-in instead of bolted-on.”
So what they are getting at is these new computing paradigms are well-embedded in the mainstream of enterprises, versus being novelties at the peripheries. In the humble opinion of this author, we're still in the thick of the digital era, but let's go with Funkhouser and Vanderslice's analysis of what's moving enterprises forward these days. They outline nine distinct forces reshaping corporate computing:
Disruptor: CIOs. “Who better to lead than the CIO? When CIOs harness the convergence of the five post-digital forces, they can change the conversation from systems to capabilities and from technical issues to business impact. Plan big, start small, fail fast, scale appropriately.”
Disruptor: Mobile. “Don’t limit your ideas to 'mobile first.' Think 'mobile only.' And the potential goes far beyond smartphones and tablets to include voice, gesture and location-based interactions.”
Disruptor: Social re engineering by design. “Businesses are now engineering social platforms for specific context—platforms that can relieve rather than serve traditional organizational constraints such as deep hierarchies, command-and-control cultures, physical proximity and resource concentration.”
Disruptor: Design as a discipline “Individual design functions may be reaching their limits. What’s needed is a collaborative, immersive environment to work together.”
Enabler: Finding the face of your data. “By combining human insight and intuition with machine number-crunching and visualization, companies can answer questions they’ve never answered before. More importantly, they can discover important new questions they didn’t know they could ask.”
Enabler: Gamification. “The goal is to recognize and encourage behaviors that drive performance—sometimes in unlikely places. Gamification in the workplace incorporates social context and location services to motivate and reward desired behaviors in today’s mobile-social world.”
Enabler: Proactive security. Change the way you think about defending yourself. “Be more proactive about the threat—and react more rapidly when breaches do occur. Detect them quickly, respond, clean up and adjust your tactics. Be outward-facing, prepared and ready in advance.”
Enabler: IT as a business. “After re-engineering the rest of the business, IT’s children deserve some shoes. IT may need to transform its own management systems to keep up.”
For a copy of the report,
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant, blogger and frequent INN contributor specializing in information technology.
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